You know how when one door closes, another one opens? Well, what if that was a curse instead of a blessing? Endless doors open and close in Christian Marclay’s latest film, but it’s not a world of new opportunities, it’s a ceaseless loop of chaos and discomfort.
The Swiss-American artist has done for doors what he did for clocks (in 2010’s excellent ‘The Clock’): trawled through cinema history for clips of people opening, entering and walking through doors and knitted them seamlessly together into a dizzying, confusing, funny, disconcerting and brilliant film.
The first thing that hits you is the constant, disjointed, jarring shifts in narrative. As a school boy walks through a door, the scene cuts to a decorated soldier emerging out the other side, Inspector Clouseau transforms into a dashing hunk, a woman turns into a man, a granny into a policeman. Every transition drags you out of the previous scene and into a different environment. Every door is a portal to a new world that you’re only ever allowed to stay in for a few moments.
An unfollowable chaos of ideas, images and sounds, a relentless visual palindrome
There are constant tonal clashes too. Not just 1930s monochrome into 1980s Technicolor, but screaming horror into soft seduction, suspense into mundanity, terror into calm. Your heart races as you’re sent spiralling through countless visual and emotional jump scares. There are a million narratives to follow, but none of them go anywhere.
Marclay’s ‘The Clock’ became an art mega-hit thanks to its durational, calm, cinematic endurance appeal. But ‘Doors’ has no set run time. It loops but you don’t know when, so instead you’re left to be bodied by the slamming and creaking until you’re utterly bewildered.
In one way, it’s a portrait of cinema, a journey from nouvelle vague to teen comedy via westerns, sci fi, body horror and everything in between. But more than that, ‘Doors’ is an act of mental manipulation, a psychological experience to endure. How many narrative threads can you handle following and losing, how many cut scenes can you sit through. It leaves your memory in tatters; did you already see that guy in the blue coming down those stairs? Or Tom Cruise screaming down a hallway? It’s like temporary amnesia, an unfollowable chaos of ideas, images and sounds, a relentless visual palindrome.
It turns out that no matter how hard you slam it shut, when one door closes, a million more will open. Terrifying.